May 29, 2010

Asked one day if he ever got tired from pitching so often, Old Hoss replied (and this is an actual quote), “Tired of tossing a little five-ounce baseball for two hours? I used to be a butcher. From four in the morning until eight at night, I knocked down steers with a 25-pound sledge. Tired from playing two hours a day for 10 times the money I used to get for 16 hours a day?”

Old Hoss clearly didn’t have time to be bothered with such absurd questions.

And I don’t want to bore you with the details of Radbourn’s pedestrian season of 1883, because it’s what happened the following year, in 1884, that created this legend and how fiction became fact.